as a territorially fixed, therefore, the border encompasses a series of practices. Such “reading” entails a more political and actor-oriented stance on how divisions between entities appear or are produced and sustained. The shift in focus also brings a sense of the dynamism of borders and bordering practices, for both are increasingly mobile—just as are the goods, services and people that they seek to control (Varsanyi, 2008). van Houtum & Strüver (2002) draw attention to the ways that borders are performed into being and describe this as a shift toward considering the human practices that constitute and represent differences in space. They add that this can be thought of as a shift toward understanding the border as a verb in the sense of “bordering”. Vaughan-Williams (2012) echoes this analysis, arguing that it is crucial to consider the schisms that are produced by borders and to treat borders as active structures that rely on practices of bordering. To think of the border as a verb is to think of it as something that must be done in order to come into being, and that does not exist as a noun without this active, processual, doing of the border. Borders become not spaces marked on a map, or onto territory, but instead actions that must be performed by human beings in relation to one another (Brown, 2010).
The shift toward thinking about how human practices construct borders, and about the processes that enact borders, marks a shift in the conception of borders that also makes it necessary to pay attention to the question of where borders are, but also what they are and what they do. Subsequently, this points to the need to articulate not to take for granted the concept of the border, but instead to ask what sort of concept it is. What sort of logic does a border both follow and impose? The question of what a border is, is not assumed to have a single ontological answer, but instead one that cannot be resolved without asking what borders do. Balibar (2002) addresses this interrogation with a caution: the question is absurd as he claims that a border has no essence. He explains that a border is different in each instance and in every experience of border-crossing, that to cross one border is not the same as to cross another, and that to cross with one passport is not the same as to cross with another (Balibar, 2004). With reference to the discussion proposed in this contribution, crossing a border without a passport, is even more complex for stateless children who are seeking to have borders in order to claim protection under nationality laws. This singularity of the border, or rather its differential existence, makes it nearly impossible to define the border, since there is no definition which would be capable of holding together these differences. To this caution, Balibar (2002) adds another warning: a border is the thing that defines a territory. It marks the limit of a territory; it defines the interior and exterior of a nation-state and in doing this, it inscribes identity.
Any act of definition inevitably involves the tracing of a boundary and therefore the construction of a border. The definition of the border forms a recursive loop. To construct a border is to define, and to define is to construct a border. For this reason, any theory seeking to pin a definition to the border is at risk of going around and around in circles, identifying borders by constructing still more borders. However, to think of a border as that which defines is, of course, already to give a sort of definition, and to enter into the recursive cycle of borders. Therefore, the caution reads as at least partly disingenuous. Taking a cue from Balibar’s (2002) caution, it could be claimed that to ask what a border is denotes a problem because the borders of different nation-states are different at different moments of history and in relation to different people, stateless children in particular. For such reasons, a universalizing ontology of borders per se is unfeasible. Furthermore, attempts to answer such questions would unavoidably construct a border. In this way, to answer the question is to reduce the complexity of the experiences of borders and would also participate in constructing borders (Balibar, 2002). Instead of working from a definition, a suggestion could be to look at what borders do and at what particular borders do at particular historical moments. To paraphrase Balibar (2002), it is possible to refer to what he calls the “equivocal character” of borders. Here the term “equivocal” gives not only the sense of a border as not being quite what it appears or claims to be, but also the sense of multiple voices and multiple meanings—of more than one possible existence of a border (see also De Genova, 2013). This equivocal character of the border is both a border’s multiplicity and its duplicity. Even as a border might appear as a simple, singular phenomenon, this is an illusion. A border is not what it seems, and it is not to be trusted. The word “equivocal” also contains within it the notion of divergent voices (“equi–vocal”). If a border deceives, it does so through the presence of many voices and many experiences, all singular and all different.
A border has many identities and many realities—those who live within the confinement of a border and those who long to have a border, as stateless children often do, experience a border differently. Borders therefore can be described as polysemic, meaning that borders do not have the same meaning for everyone, and indeed this differential meaning is essential to the function of the border. Borders are, nonetheless, sites of administrative control (De Genova et al., 2014). The selective controls that filter populations and control the movement of people are the function of the border (Anzaldúa, 1999). These controls are always concentrated along a geographic line that marks the territorial limit of the nation-state. However, these sites of administrative control have been dispersed throughout social space and, therefore, some borders are no longer situated at the borders at all, in the geographical, political and administrative sense of the term. They are in fact elsewhere, wherever selective controls are to be found specifically (Policek et al. 2020) where the rhetoric of danger is too often associated with the status of being a foreigner.
In another formulation of the same idea, borders become dislocated if not ubiquitous as they are replicated by other “checkpoints” within the territories of the state (Doty, 2011). Understanding the border as the site where selective controls are enacted provides an incredibly dynamic and flexible view of the border. If borders exist where they are enacted, then they can not only be in many different spaces, mapped and unmapped, but they can also move, appear and disappear (Hayter, 2000). Inevitably, this also means that as these practices of control take place throughout national space, the border also moves from a liminal geographic space to something that is enacted and experienced throughout national space. While there are the recognizable infrastructures of control (airport border control, for example, is often explicitly labelled as the border, despite being located internally within the nation), it also allows for a consideration of the less obvious sites where the border materializes. Borders can in fact become ubiquitous when they are thought of in relation to the enactment of control (van Houtum & Strüver, 2002).An example of borders appearing through their enactment is provided by the carrier sanctions administered by the United Kingdom’s government that makes carriers liable for any undocumented persons they may transport to the country, even if these people are stowaways and the carrier was unaware of their presence on the vehicle (Chacon, 2009). Due to these liability laws, carriers seeking to avoid fines for transporting undocumented passengers have introduced measures to deter and police would-be migrants. In particular, lorries arriving to the United Kingdom from Europe more and more often have been built to be securely locked, their design impenetrable to would-be stowaways. The defensive construction of the lorries is accompanied by a compulsory methodical inspection of the carriage area by the driver. It could be argued that these sanctions move the border to the very surface of the lorries crossing international boundaries and that the border moves with these lorries. Thus, the entire road transportation system becomes a kind of networked border. The border transforms into a mobile, non-contiguous zone materializing at the very surface of the lorry and every place it stops. In this manner, the border comes into being (materialises) not only when the driver stops the lorry and inspects it, but also in the very materiality of the lorry that is designed to obstruct the migrant. In other words, there is a border wherever there is a measure taken to prevent migration, and it is a border that can appear and disappear through the performance of specific practices (Diener & Hagen, 2012).
Different Borders for Different People
The border is designed to give different people (those from different social classes) different experiences of the law and of freedom. Border law enables some to pass national frontiers, while denying others the same opportunity;
